(Jed had phased her out by this stage)
“—and all I’ve been expecting from you is a bit of human kindness. Me mother’s breathing her last in hospital, Paddy and themmuns is blaming me, everyone in town’s clambering to snatch the money out of me handbag, money, by the way, I already know is long gone, as I went to see yer man Bewley at the bank the other day, and that one was avoiding me as clearly as if the flesh was hanging from me bones from the leprosy! If ye were having money problems, don’t ye know ye could’ve come to me? Haven’t we helped one another out throughout the years of wer marriage? All them problems with Gretchen and Egbert, and all during yer eye surgery, and then that uncle of yers who wanted a lend of the money to start his own kielbasa business and ye had to turn him down, wasn’t I there for all of it for ye?”
“Yeah, screaming in my face,” Jed said.
That’s not how Ursula remembered it.
“Ye could show me a wee bit of support,” she said quietly, her face taut.
“What do you want me to do?” he pleaded again, reaching for the flask and guzzling down.
Ursula set her lips again.
“I want ye to talk some sense into me brother Paddy,” she said. “Youse play darts every Wednesday, aye? I want ye to tell him the next time ye see him to stop this crucifixion.”
Jed stared. There was no bad blood between Jed and Paddy, his darts partner and drinking buddy, and why should there be? His brother-in-law made life in Derry tolerable for Jed, had shared his finger grip wax and pints for the better part of the decade Jed had been prisoner in Northern Ireland. Ursula should thank her lucky stars for her younger brother because, without him, Jed would have been on a flight to Wisconsin years ago.
That Ursula’s relationship with her younger brother had been rather less than stellar Jed was well aware. But that hadn’t affected the camaraderie foraged between two men stranded in the matriarchal world that was Irish society, where women were brash and opinionated, hardened sons shed tears for fear of causing their mothers grief, and husbands raced home after last orders to avoid all hell breaking loose.
“Look, Ursula, Paddy’s the only friend I have here, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to get into an argument with him just because you lack basic human social skills and nobody can stand you.”
Ursula couldn’t have felt more alone among the living if she were buried alive in a coffin. The Floods, Roisin, her mother—Mrs. Feeney even! —and now her husband: all were discarding her like a piece of toilet tissue they had just discovered on the heel of their shoe. A lesser woman would have marched up the stairs and slit her wrists in the bathtub. Ursula, though, glared at Jed with a steely resolve even as the tears of despair and isolation welled in her eyes.
“Why can’t ye be on me side?” she asked. The way she said it, he never was.
She stood up and silently made her way out of the lounge.
£ £ £ £
Mr. O’Toole flounced up to David with a worried brow and a cagey glance around the merchandise.
“Stop shelving them body sprays and get yerself down to aisle seven. I want ye to clear out all them pregnancy tests ASAP,” he instructed surreptitiously. “I'm after getting word from the manufacturer that the whole piggin shipment’s gone off.”
David stared up at him.
“Gone off? How do ye mean?”
“How would I know, ye silly boy!” Mr. O’Toole snapped. “I'm not a pharmaceutical expert, thank feck! Past their sell-buy date or some such.”
“Ye mean—”
“Aye, they tell weemin they’re up the scoot when they’re not, and the other way around.” Mr. O’Toole glanced nervously again up and down the aisle. “I can only hope we don’t have the solicitors banging down wer door clutching handfuls of flimmin compensation lawsuits.”
“I think the customers would be relieved as feck! Me Vera’s after taking one of them tests the other week, and we were heading to Liverpool next Friday for the termination.”
Mr. O’Toole squirmed, aghast.
“Less of the personal life, if ye please!” he tutted. “Clear that rubbish off them shelves, just!”
Mr. O’Toole minced off through the video games, feeling slightly soiled, equal parts repulsed and aroused at the thought of the sex lives of the hired help.
As general manager of the local branch of Top-Yer-Trolly, Henry O’Toole lorded over a revolving door of unskilled laborers. His flush management salary and university education were evident in the specially tailored suits from Next which he bought at full high street prices. He was well aware from the weekly inventory what the problems and concerns of those under his wardship were, as huge crate loads of evidence were unloaded into the stockroom every week. He knew of their weakness for cheap lager and discount crisps, foot creams and rolling papers, mobile phone top-up cards and yeast infection suppositories, of the fizzy minerals and curry chips that rotted their stomachs and their teeth, their meager National Health dental schemes unable to keep up with the abuse.
As manager of the underprivileged masses, he was privy to every detail of their dreary working lives: their misguided arrogance, their lack of common manners or civility, their grubby fingernails and methadone, strong thighs and weak morals. The slutty shop floor girls and lumpen stock boys from pebbledashed council houses, the checkout girls in their cheap scent and out of cheaper knickers. He thought long and hard in bed at night about those in his employ and the beastly, swaggering fellas they always paired off with, unhygienic and undereducated, breeding viciously and uncontrollably after Sunday mass between bouts of screeching rows and lager-fueled beatings while the drawing for the National Lottery played on the telly in the background (or so his imagination went). Were he to succumb to the revolting allure of their class, it would be like, the good Lord forgive him, bedding down with a common beast. He adjusted himself as he walked down the corridor. What man on earth could resist? He was thinking of both this and the requisition forms he would have to complete when who did he spy, standing in the corridor before his office, her fingers coaxing the door handle, but the queen of the working class slappers herself, Dymphna Flood.
Mr. O’Toole set his jaw.
“Ye’re after coming back from Altnagelvin?” he asked. “How’s yer granny?”
“At death’s door.”
“Ye’re not getting another advance,” he warned, “dead granny or no.”
“Naw. It’s a question about me duties I'm here for.”
O’Toole feigned shock.
“Duties? And here I was thinking ye had none except for giving the customers all sorts of grief and unease!”
Was it his filthy fancy, or had she been welcoming him with her eyes over the meat and cheese counter ever since he had given her that £50 advance? The shameless tart now seemed to be wearing nothing but a smirk and her Top-Yer-Trolly smock. How he wanted her poised over his bony, naked back, perhaps gripping a whip!
“Have ye nothing on under that smock of yers?” he said. “This is a family establishment, ye know. We’ve standards of dress, if ye wanny look em up in the staff manual. Not that I suppose ye’ve ever taken a glance at it, reading not being yer thing and all.”
“Where might we have a wee word?”
“Where do ye think?” he asked, giving a testy nod at the door to his office. “That’s what an office is for, like.”
Dimwittedness was another trait quite common in the lower classes, he remembered. They paired off against each other in the corridor, the tension as thick as her brain.
“Naw,” Dymphna said, for she knew the entire store was hooked up with video cameras that spied on their every move. The presumption of management that all shop floor chattel were a bunch of thieving stokes was quite insulting to Dymphna, but she also knew that David had cleverly rigged the cameras in the back stockroom to run on an old looped tape so that he could rifle through the inventory when he had spent all his wages on drink. “I’ve to show ye something in the back stockroom.”
Mr. O’Toole’s face blossomed with intrigue.
“And what might ye have to show me in the back stockroom?” he asked.
“Ye mind when ye gave me that advance the other day? I could barely credit it. I wanny show ye how thankful I'm are.”
Mr. O’Toole felt a twitching.
“And how thankful are ye?” he asked.
“Lemme show ye how,” she replied, reaching for his hand and caressing his knobby knuckles. She guided him down the corridor and tugged open the door to the store room.
“This looks a nice wee sturdy surface,” Dymphna said, patting a crate. “It’ll hold. C’mere you beside me now.”
There was a clank as his belt buckle hit the floor.
“Ye filthy, common cow!” he extolled with a pant. “I’ve wanted ye ever since ye filled out yer application with an ‘aye’ next to the Sex category!”
And he had her there in the back stockroom, right on the shipment of new pregnancy tests, filling her with revulsion, but also finally—thank feck!—soaking her Orange bastard fetus in hearty Green spermatozoa.
CHAPTER SIX
ROISIN THE SAVIOR PARADED into the front room with three fish suppers, one sausage supper, one single fish, one single chips, a single sausage, a chicken and chips, and three curry and chips.
“Thank Christ wer Lord!” Fionnuala moaned, almost knocking Seamus to the carpeting to get her hands on the food.
“The queue at the chippy was wound clear up to Creggan!” Roisin said as Fionnuala grabbed at the greasy parcels. “Like the flippin Soviet Union, so it was!”
“Never you mind that, lemme at them chips, just!” Paddy panted.
And then it was the like the National Guard passing out rations to a mob of haggard evacuees as the Floods clambered and elbowed each other, snatching the bundles of rations from Roisin and gashing at the paper to get at the provisions within. If Roisin was startled at their bestial behavior, she didn’t let on. She heaved herself atop an ottoman in a sea of discarded wrappings and chomped into a battered sausage.
Eoin, looking unusually flush and skittish, entered the front room. “Any bars, hi? Fish and chips? Fecking brilliant! I could murder a portion!”
“Sit you down and get stuck in, son,” Paddy said.
Roisin tossed him a fish supper, and the sitting room pulsed with their slurping and smacking, the air pungent with vinegar and batter.
“Magic! I'm ravenous!” Dymphna said, home from her romp in the stockroom of the Top-Yer-Trolly and settling herself down on the hearth, curls tousled, eyes bright and smock askew.
“Skulking off from yer granny’s deathbed!” Fionnuala greeted her daughter, teeth tearing at a chicken breast. “Ye’ve not an ounce of shame, have ye?”
“I had to get back to work!” Dymphna protested.
“Me granny died?” Eoin asked, startled. Was I there to see it? What’s the feck’s them wingers doing to me brain? “Brilliant, hi! When can we move werselves in and watch that flat screen telly?”
“She’s in the hospital, just,” Roisin clarified, passing Dymphna a sausage supper. “Yer auntie Ursula’s after torturing the heart clear outta her ribcage.”
Dymphna reached up expectantly for her sausage supper, but Fionnuala smacked Roisin’s hand away.
“She’s not to be getting any,” she said. “There’s a Pot Noodles in the larder for that shameless tart. Chicken Vindaloo flavored.”
Dymphna tensed. Her mother knew she couldn’t abide curry. She plodded her way into the scullery. Fionnuala chomped down on her daughter’s battered sausage and turned brightly to her beloved son.
“I was wondering if ye can chip in to get me an appointment at Xpressions to get me nails done. Me hands and feet both, like.”
Eoin squirmed uncomfortably on the settee as he scoffed down.
“There’s a wee problem with me finances at the moment, like.”
Siofra had finally whiffed the vinegar and chips and batter and scurried down from her lair. She shirked at the sight of Eoin, recoiling as if she had been scalded, and scuttered back into the front hall. Eoin slipped out of his chair into the hallway, hoping the family was too busy scoffing down to notice. But Fionnuala’s nosy-parker eyes never missed a trick. She sidled towards the doorjamb, head cocked, ears perked, jowls churning. Siofra made for the stairs, but Eoin grabbed her by the ponytail.
“Where’s me gear, you?” he hissed.
“Yer gear?” Siofra trembled up at him. “I went over to the market after the peelers hauled ye off and sold it.”
“Ye...sold it?”
She was suddenly defiant.
“I did indeed, aye,” she said proudly. “Got fifty pee for each disco sweetie! It was effin lethal! Thirty-two pounds, I got! Now where’s me fish and chips?”
She tugged away from him and scuttled into the safety of the sitting room as Eoin stared after her, horrified.
“Thirty two...!” He did some quick math and raced into the sitting room, his panic rising. “Where’s the rest? There was over two hundred wingers left in that bag!”
“Aye. The copper took the rest.”
“Copper?” Eoin blanched. “Me supplier’ll be looking for 300 quid off of me for the sale of that gear!”
“That thirty-two pounds is for me communion gown,” Siofra said through a mouth bulging with batter. “It’s mines!”
“Ye better give it to me or ye’ll be spending it on a frock for yer brother’s funeral instead,” he said.
“Me brain’s struggling to comprehend what me fecking ears is hearing!” Fionnuala spit out through a few bones, clipping Eoin around the head. “Ye mean to say ye hauled yer wee sister onto the pavement to sell yer drugs? She’s but eight, her!”
She didn’t know what made her more angry: Eoin’s lack of common sense, or her pedicure slipping away.
“And what’s all this palaver about the fecking Filth?” Paddy boomed from his chair as Roisin looked on, enraptured and shaking some salt onto her curry and chips.
Eoin took a deep breath as he settled back down with his fish and finally took the plunge.
“I’ve meself a new job,” he admitted to his family. “The Special Branch picked me up the day and hauled me off to that deserted woodland next to the mental institution. Never youse mind, as the quids’ll still be rolling in. The Special Branch said I could earn up to £12,000 a year informing for the peelers. All I gotta do is keep me ears peeled for any mention of clandestine activates when I'm picking up me stash from me suppliers in Creggan. The McDaids is in with the Provos, ye understand? Effin magic, aye?”
All molars ceased in mid-chew, and all eyes stared. As Padraig’s curry chips clattered to the carpeting, Eoin’s grin faltered.
“God bless us!” Roisin twittered, hand to her bleeding heart.
“Mary Mother of fecking God!” Paddy finally roared from his armchair. “Consorting with the enemy, you!”
Eoin jumped as his father wrenched the cod out of his lap. There was a limit to the gainful delinquency his parents’ greed would condone after all, and Eoin suspected he would soon be sat in front of a Pot Noodles as well.
“Have ye not an ounce of shame in that fecking thick skull of yers?” Paddy said. “Have ye forgotten the Easter Rising of 1916? The blood of wer forefathers spilled on O’Connell Bridge to give us the basic human rights of the rest of the world? Bloody fecking Sunday? Ye mind that? Thirteen innocent victims marching for civil rights gunned down in the Moorside by rifle-toting Proddy paratrooping bastards? The same murderous Orange swine ye’re licking the arses of now!”
“That slapper’s been sleeping with Proddy bastards!” Eoin protested, pointing at Dymphna sitting on the hearth slurping obediently out of her Pot Noodle. “Her bastard’s a manky, mingin Orange cow!”
“Naw!” Dymphna cried, fork poised in mid-air. “I had me dates all wrong! The father of me wane doesn’t be a Proddy after all. It’s Mr. O’Toole.”
“Ye mean that pansy outta the Top-Yer-Trolly
?” Fionnuala snorted. “Ach, go on away a that!”
“He had me on the stockroom floor,” Dymphna insisted. “Four weeks ago, it was.”
Paddy put down his chips, nauseated.
“Yer fancy man’s a fecking nancy boy?” he demanded to know.
“How did ye come to think her wane’s a Proddy?” Roisin demanded of Eoin. She took a bite of cod, quite happy to stir up the trouble.
“She told me!”
“I was outta me mind with drink and hadn’t a clue what I was saying,” Dymphna pleaded. “I never slept with Orange bastards!”
Fionnuala gawped down at her tainted offspring.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What are youse like?” she wondered.
“Flippin disgraces, that’s what!” Paddy decided. “Orange Proddy bastards has been stealing wer land, raping wer weemin, sending their wanes to the better schools, snatching the best paid jobs...!”
“We live with em in the same town, sure,” Eoin attempted. “We gotta interact with em somehow, like.”
“Aye, and since the advent of the rave culture in the early nineties, E’s has been spreading love between the religious factions—” Dymphna began.
“Me eyes kyanny stomach the sight of youse!” Paddy roared. “I’ve half a mind to march yer traitorous bodies out to the back garden for a tar and featherin! I want youse outta me house before I batter the Orange- loving shite outta yer bodies!”
“God bless us and save us!” Roisin finally bellowed. “Stop the roaring out of ye, the lot of youse! If youse’d pay me some mind, I’ve the solution to everything.”
All heads turned. Any other ex-pat fresh from the tarmac of Belfast International would have kept their nose out. Not Roisin. She motioned over to Eoin.
“I gather that wan’s been supporting the family with money from drug sales?” Roisin said, then nodded to Dymphna. “And that slapper is pregnant outta wedlock?”
Paddy and Fionnuala confirmed with sharp nods.
“It sickens the heart outta me to tell ye this,” Roisin lied, “but there’s to be more bother on its way. I hear ye’ve been collecting a caretaker’s allowance for Eda these past few years?”
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 15
